Besides the already mentioned Malayan Emergency, the insurgents in the Mau Mau Uprising were beaten by the British/Kenyan militaries.
Similarly, the Boers lost the Anglo-Boer War of 1899-1902, the Filipinos came off second best in the Philippine-American War, and the Americans defeated the
Moro Rebellion.
So yes, it does happen- insurgents are not guaranteed to win.
This is oversimplifying, I think. Many Scots (including Highlanders) opposed the Jacobites, and many English (particularly in the North) supported their aims. Certainly if the English Tories had held their nerve for longer, the House of Stuart may well have been restored. At Culloden, there were many Scots who fought under Butcher Cumberland, a fact that tourist literature often omits, for some reason.
That’s it. It takes a will to “squash” the shits out, despite the corollary damage and negative press. All this Iraq stuff would have been done easily by now if we weren’t such pussies. There are winners and losers in life, fuck the losers.
I hope I’m being whooshed, but if you’re suggesting the U.S. and its allies should, in 2007, adopt Iraqi counterinsurgency tactics of which Stalin would approve, no thanks, dude. We are - or should be - better than that. I’d rather lose than go down that road.
Also, Germany had a substantial history of fairly demoratic, secular, widespread bourgeois socio-politico-economic peace, so it was a fairly easy call for war-ravaged civilians (and the old-line general staff types) to say, hey, it was way better being peaceful burghers under Bismarck than this crap. I don’t know that Iraqis have anything as attractive/successful even as the shaky Weimar period to look back on as an alternative way of running their country.
Minor Nitpick: Wales, Scotland and Ireland were forced to be part of something eventually called “The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland”.